Programming

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Beyond Foreign Keys (lackofimagination.org)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Aijan to c/programming

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (6 children)

So... a polymorphic many-to-many join table?

[–] Aijan 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yes, that's correct. Here's how an entry in the join table looks like:

{
  "id": 6,
  "sourceComp": "user",
  "sourceId": 2,
  "targetComp": "post",
  "targetId": 3,
  "type": "author",
  "createdAt": "2024-03-28T13:28:59.175Z",
  "updatedAt": "2024-03-28T13:28:59.175Z"
}

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Fine for prototyping, but adds a scaling tech debt "time bomb" for a live system. Those associations had better be really sparse.

[–] Aijan 2 points 8 months ago

There's certainly the danger of creating too many ad-hoc or sparse relationships, which can cause issues. That said, when used for supplementing foreign keys, Tie-in can be a useful tool in a production system as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Don't you want a graph database at this point?

[–] Aijan 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That idea crossed my mind too, but you can’t really use the full capabilities of SQL in graph databases, and that’s a deal breaker for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

i was thinking the same thing

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